A THOUSAND WORDS - Alex Waterhouse-Hayward's blog on pictures, plants, politics and whatever else is on his mind.

Y si Dios fuera mujer - What if God Were a Woman

Thursday, June 28, 2018

Linda Lorenzo - Photograph - Alex Waterhouse-Hayward

These days I am printing up with my Canon Pro-1 Inkjet Printer my show which I will share with Argentine artist Nora Patrich at the nicely named Galería Vermeer in Buenos Aires. The "muestra" will open mid September. Because the galler's space is not big I must choose carefully. I have opted to have as much of an Argentine/Buenos Aires presence in the content of my photographs. I could easily just place photographs of the sensationally beautiful Argentine Linda Lorenzo. But that would simply be a repetition of a show called Nostalgia that Nora Patrich, Juan Manuel Sánchez and I had in Vancouver in 2001 at a South Granville gallery. So I have limited my Lorenzo output to four. But then I look at this photograph (and there are many, many more) and I feel frustrated, limited and vexed.

In this age of in-your-face pornography I revel at looking at my photographs of Lorenzo and feeling a bout of a subjective Argentine opinion (mine) that Argentine women are the most beautiful and erotic of all.

In a different age that was the 20th century my mother, who had a slim body, wore a girdle when she rode the Argentine buses called colectivos. This was her defense from avid Argentine pinchers. In the 60s I noticed that Argentine men, in colectivos were gentlemen only in the summer. Why? They would cede their seas to skimpily-dressed women so they could look down on their cleavage.

Now in this century, and at my age of 75, I must keep these thoughts to myself or perhaps take the chance that I may not offend all with them. Uruguayan writer Mario Benedetti (14 September 1920 – 17 May 2009), whose complete name was Mario Orlando Hardy Hamlet Breen Benedetti Farrugia, had a special knack for writing erotic poems. There is another Uruguayan with that knack. He is Eduardo Galeano.

Here in Canada in this century I am enjoying reading the poems by our very Canadian Susan Musgrave who gives Benedetti a run for his Uruguayan Pesos. As a sample to well illustrate Linda Lorenzo wearing a gaucho pant called a bombacha, a gaucho belt called a rastra and holding my facón ( a gaucho knife). Below both in Spanish and in English ( a rare translation as Benedetti is not as well known in these parts as other Latin American writers is his poem) is his Y si dios fuera mujer (What if God Were a Woman)